Weird PR move?

SE regularly bans ToS-breaking accounts under the big umbrella of RMT activities that they belong to in the thousands. Imagine now reading two headlines that address like it was some major breakthrough operation that SE had planned for weeks like some drug sting they executed. Suffice to say that I had a "Oh that's grea--wait a minute..." moment when I noticed how both articles mentioned the Endwalker expansion in the same breath.

Weird flex PR move or was there truly some special about this banwave that I missed?

Sources : https://www.gamesradar.com/amp/squar...money-trading/

https://www.gamespot.com/amp-article.../1100-6488498/

Looks like some journalists just noticed the regular bot bans for the first time. These sort of things are common for journalists who play this briefly then move onto the next game they are reviewing.

I think SE has nothing to do with it and one of the two saw news on it and thought it was a big deal enough to post it. And then because in game journalism it's just easier to copy, the other website copied it. I thought it kinda weird myself seeing these, like "uh these happen quite frequently?"

This article is very...random indeed.

While it is nice that the number of weekly bans is no longer in the 20K+ range, I question whether or not that's due to SE changing something or the RMTers deciding it wasn't actually necessary to make that many bots.

Must have been a slow news day, those are just random clickbait articles.

I'm not sure the author had checked bans from the previous months. There was a post about almost 10k accounts banned for RMT in February.

The real question that should be asked is, "Why are there so few bot bans listed?".

Most likely journalists thinking that 5000 people being banned will impress readers/make a headline because it's 5000 people being banned. Those who aren't a part of the FF14 community already would probably be like: "O.O uh wot? Drama?" Meanwhile we're here like this isn't anything new.

Also, throw in Endwalker because hype train and free clicks.

Yes thought so as well. Multiple sites publishing it around the same time

You know there's a content drought on ffxiv when even game articles starts making news out of nothing like this. The previous one was even larger so this isn't even news.

Might not be a bad idea to contact the authors of these articles to let them know the real situation.